Ester Bloom has joined Ta-Nehisi Coates in urging us to have a frank conversation about how to fix the massive racial injustices that inhere in our country. Coates proposes monetary reparations as an institutional remedy for the crushing toll of slavery, Jim Crow terrorism, and subsequent racist public policy. But what about the deeply ingrained attitudes, especially among white people, that perpetuate racial injustice? I don’t mean the cartoon plutocrat racism of Donald Sterling, which is ultimately a distracting anomaly. I mean the subtle favoritism that crops up in the choices we make when dating, hiring, and choosing where to live—the implicit racism we never consider. What’s the reparations for that, and are we willing to pay the price?

Have we all had a chance to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s cri de coeur about the historical argument for reparations? If not, take this opportunity to grab a cup of coffee and dive into it. We’ll wait. The piece is well-written and well-argued; you will emerge from it with a much deeper appreciation of the effects of several hundred years of Constitutionally-enshrined, community-enforced, and, up until only a few decades ago, government-supported white supremacy.

Spoiler alert: He isn’t asking us to agree on a dollar figure. He wants America as a country to face up to the facts and have the conversation:

We must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. … I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as — if not more than — the specific answers that might be produced.

The Internet being what it is, naturally some interesting response pieces have come in and are worth reading in conjunction with TNC’s:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a book recommendation. It is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth Of Other Suns, “a narrative history of the Great Migration through the eyes of actual migrants.” (It was one of the NYTBR’s best books of the year in 2011.) A key takeaway, he says, is that America does not want a black middle class. “On a policy level, there is a persistent strain wherein efforts to aid The People are engineered in such a way wherein they help black people a lot less … At this point, such efforts no longer require open bigotry. They are simply built into the system.”

“Get the book,” he writes. “Read it now. Today is too late.” Here it is at Amazon. And at Powell’s. And at Goodreads.

Our discourse around poverty, and particularly the so-called “culture of poverty,” often proceeds as if most poor people are black and most black people are poor. Neither is true. In 2012, 46.5 million people fell below the official poverty line. Within that 46.5 million, there were 1.9 million Asians, 10.9 million blacks, 13.6 million Latinos, and 18.9 million whites. Although black people have the highest poverty rate at 27.2 percent (barely above the Latino poverty rate of 25.6 percent), black poverty accounts for less than one-fourth of U.S. poverty.

Thus, most of what is said about black culture and black poverty fails to address three-fourths of the overall problem. What causes black poverty rates to be so elevated is an important discussion to have, but it is a much narrower one than most people seem to think. If black poverty rates were as low as white poverty rates, that would amount to seven million fewer people in the ranks of the impoverished. To reiterate: There are 46.5 million people currently below the official poverty line. Seven million people is a lot of people, but it is not the totality of the American poverty problem, not even close.

Bruenig also looks further back in our history when pundits also blamed poor whites for their “culture of poverty.” In a book published in 1979 called Dixie’s Forgotten People, Wayne Flint argued that “poor whites lacked ambition; they were violent, sexually promiscuous people who did not respect human life.” Bruenig sums it up like this: “anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.”